Mad Web Skills

I’ve recently had the pleasure of properly working with ExpressionEngine for the first time on a couple of client projects. The experience with EllisLab‘s flagship content management system so far has been mostly great; there is a lot of power under the hood and a solid methodology behind one of EE‘s greatest strengths: the ability to manage almost any kind of content you can think of.

EE has managed to do quite well for itself, despite costing $299 for a commercial license, and competing against hundreds of free, open-source products such as WordPress, CMSMS, Joomla and Drupal.

It also has a strong aftermarket for addons, modules and plugins to add useful features that are not included in the out-of-the-box package. This can be great to enhance your website beyond the scope of what is normally provided by a CMS, such as e-commerce, calendar events, image galleries, etc.

But there has been one sour note that has been making me question whether I’ll continue to recommend EE for new projects going forward: EE relies too heavily on paid addons to provide basic functionality that I feel should come out-of-the-box with any commercial CMS.

Here are just a few areas where I feel EE falls short of where it should be:

• Websites are made of pages. It sounds obvious, but the included ‘Pages’ module is quite limited in it’s usefulness. While pages can be kinda nested into some sort of heirarchy, there’s not much you can do with that structure. The ‘Structure’ module goes a long way towards managing your website’s IA much easier, but it costs an extra $65.
• Navigation is a drag. Most EE tutorials only cover static, hard-coded navigation which works fine until the client wants to be able to add new pages themselves. Once you have your pages organised into a nice, meaningful structure, unless you want to fumble around with awkward categories, to generate navigation dynamically from this structure will require another $35 for a navigation addon.
• Want to crop or resize images from in the template? Lets say you want a blog post’s image to be used as a thumbnail on your homepage. Then again in your blog index. Then again on the actual blog post page. Then again for the image enlargement. That’s at least four different sizes you’ll need. EE can automatically resize or crop an image on upload, and that’s cool, but this is not explained very well in the documentation and is not very developer friendly. The ‘CE Image’ plugin has been fantastic for addressing this, albeit for an extra $15.
• File management is a jumbled mess. The ‘Assets’ module can help you with that for an extra $55. It says something about how underdeveloped file management is in EE when the addon authors say that “at last, managing your files [can be] just as powerful and elegant as managing the rest of your content in ExpressionEngine.”

These costs all add up, and in my case, brought the overall cost of the CMS to much more than what I first quoted to the client. This is my fault more than anything for not doing the research and assuming too much about what EE would offer OOTB.

EE has a strong, passionate community who I’m sure will jump to its defence with the following:

• the CMS provides the tools to cope with the requirements for a majority of websites;
• it is built on a strong platform (CodeIgniter) and provides APIs for developers to extend any percieved shortcomings quite easily; and
• the cost of the addons should simply be included in the quote for your project and passed on to the client.

These are all true, but I guess I’m really just questioning what base-level functionality should be expected in a commercial CMS of this price. What do you think?

Yesterday, Ryan Carson (of Carsonified) tweeted the following:

It’s always hard to concisely convey a thought, especially one as blunt as this one, in 140 characters without ruffling a few feathers, so after copping a bit of flack, Ryan followed up with a post on the Think Vitamin blog.

Ryan is a very smart guy with over 10 years experience and several successful companies under his belt, and I mostly agree with Ryan’s comments, however I felt his views may be a bit myopic.

I personally couldn’t see myself hiring a dedicated UX/UE person. I believe that any web developer (which is the catch-all term I use to describe someone who develops websites – not just programmers) worth his/her salt should have all of the skills needed to take a web project through from concept to completion. They don’t have to be an expert in every field, but they should have a strong understanding of the principles behind great user experiences. UX is a design practice; a subset of skills, not a job title.

He is absolutely correct in saying that web developers should know these UX principles and apply them to all aspects of the web design process, however the problem is that not everyone does. Generalists are jack-of-all-trades, with one or two specialisations in their strongest fields, and unfortunately, for many web developers (especially those more on the dev/programming side) they are not UX specialists. I feel that most of UX is just common sense, but I can understand the need for dedicated UX specialists in large agencies or companies that create complex applications with fiddly UI interfaces.

However, I feel that the same job can be performed by a small team of generalists in a peer review/agile/scrum development process. In my day job I work as part of a small team of two generalists. We are always bouncing ideas, wire-frames and interface options off each other, working towards delivering the best experience for the end user.

Also, I get the understanding that in Ryan Carson World™, all web agencies must be small-medium teams or freelancers, and their projects are low-risk or single-function web apps. When there is a lot riding on a project, the risk of failure needs to be minimised as much as possible, and in some cases you need to bring in the big guns. I consider myself a half-way decent designer, and have designed logos, stationary and print advertising for clients in the past , even though it’s not my speciality. However, if a large, national client requested the same service as part of a new product launch, you can bet the farm that I’d be getting specialist help.

In his post, Ryan says:

A web site or app should be the product of a Web Designer and a Web Developer (who occasionally are the same person, as demonstrated by Shaun Inman).

In this sentence Ryan acknowledges that clever people like Shaun Inman exist. By Ryan’s own logic, why even have separate job titles for design and development. Why not just hire a crack team of Shaun Inman super-soldiers that are experts at everything and take over the world? The problem is that finding a talented, well-rounded web designer is rare, while phoney-baloney UX “experts” and “professionals” are abundant.

In the end, companies should just hire the best people they need to get the job done.

A marketing email from Loop11, the maker of online usability testing software, did the rounds among local government IT managers, marketing teams and mailing groups last week claiming in it’s subject that “City Of Melbourne website ranks 2nd in Australia.”

Screenshot of the Loop11 website offering the usability case study.

The email, offering a usability case study on six of Australia’s capital city websites, got passed around some of the execs/managers at my day job with much interest, then passed to me for evaluation – well, actually it was more of a “TL;DR. Why aren’t we on top of this list?” (We’re not a capital city for starters. )

On reading the published report, there were a few things that immediately stood out for me. First of all, this post is not intended as a rant, merely an observation and commentary on both the marketing aspect of the report and the user testing process. Loop11 looks like a great tool, and this exercise has most likely drummed up quite a bit of interest in their product as well as the idea of user testing in general.

There is some obvious link-baiting going on in the email subject. Not to detract at all from Melbourne’s great website (of which I’m a fan), they came second out of six captial city websites, not exactly “2nd in Australia” as mentioned in the email’s subject. There’s no doubt that the sole purpose of the report was an attention-grabbing marketing exercise for Loop11′s user testing software. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however the test itself seems rushed and inconclusive.

The six council websites were tested by 600 random world-wide internet users to complete one single task (100 testers per website) recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service which, to me, sounds like the internet equivalent of a sweat shop. The testers were paid 5 cents each for completing the task.

When conducting your own testing, you would be better to test a much smaller selection of people. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen believes that 85% of problems can be found with only 5 users (and a follow-up test with 5 more users should pick up most of the remaining problems.) You would also likely offer higher compensation (such as a free cinema ticket) to get a better buy-in from your participants.

The task the testers had to complete was “Find out what day your household waste is collected”. So in the end, the result is less “most usable website” and more “most prominent waste collection link“. In a real-world test scenario, you would obviously test more website functions across a number of council services.

As I said before, I actually really like Loop11′s software and think it can be really beneficial when performed adequately, however the price tag of $350USD per test ended up being a bit of a sore point for us. Being a developer of web applications who enjoys a challenge, it has definitely given me a bit to think about regarding perhaps developing my own in-house user testing application in the future.

Those zany boffins* at ZURB have just unleashed their latest creation: something they call Bounce. Their website claims Bounce is a “fun and easy way to share ideas on a website” and after a quick play, I’d have to agree. It allows you to instantly take a screenshot of a website, annotate it with feedback and share it with others to provide their comments, all without a single login or sign up form in sight.

Bounce is a lightweight and totally free (as in beer) version of their Notable app, created as a way of both spreading the word about their paid offering, as well as a “sandbox” of sorts, allowing them to test new interface ideas and features without potentially upsetting their paying customers with untested concepts.

I think this idea is brilliant. It’s very similar to the way that 37signals uses their free apps, Ta-Da List and Writeboard, to promote their bread-and-butter products such as Basecamp. As a bonus, for those users that are happy to just go on using just the free app, the 37signals brand is still in the back of their minds as a generous company willing to share some of their simpler tools with the wider community.

Personally, I’ll be getting getting a lot of use out of Bounce, and I’d be very interested to find out how this move pays off for ZURB in the long term.

* While I can’t personally vouch for the exact level of boffinry possessed by ZURB, I’m sure they’re quite bright.

I’ve always been a bit wary about “The Secret“, the same way I’m wary about psychics and mediums. Many people are sold on the idea based on some kind of silver-bullet or magic-wand notion that it’s going to make them feel good or change their lives forever.

While I personally believe that psychics and the supernatural like are a load of old bunk, I can understand the reasons and the value placed on them by those that who do believe, such as grieving relatives looking for closure after the passing of a loved one. What makes me angry are those that prey on the weak minded, giving false hope instead of comfort and closure with the aim of extracting more money, but that is a rant for anther day.

Unlike psychics, I have no doubt that “The Secret” can work, but not in the way that the author and her publisher would have you believe. While it may work, that doesn’t mean it will work. It’s not like some kind of magic switch, in fact, there’s nothing spiritual, mystical or phantasmagorical about it. There’s no Jedi force, glowing auras, harmonic resonance or any phoney “Law of Attraction” at work here. It basically boils down to one basic truth.

Your chance at being successful at something increases exponentially the more passionate you are about it.

I’m not talking about a casual hobby or a passing interest. I mean an all-consuming passion for the subject where you can work so hard on achieving your goals but you’re so focussed that it doesn’t feel like work. Take a look at successful people throughout history. They weren’t bestowed with phenomenal cosmic powers or share some ancient powerful secret. Their success came from their passion, their will to see it through, and the hard work that went along with it.

I’m a web guy. It’s not just what I do; it’s who I am. I’m always being approached by people with the idea for the “next big thing”, even having to sign the odd NDA or no-compete clause. You know how it always ends?

1. I build out the project on spec, on time and on budget.
2. The client sits back rubbing their hands together, waiting for the money to come in.
3. The website is left to stagnate, usually closing within 2 years, rarely turning a profit.

I swear, it’s like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes every time.

Of course I have my own “big ideas”, and maybe one day I’ll work hard and make something of them, but the point I wanted to make was that you can have the best idea in the world, the best plan and even the best execution, but I guarantee you will be beaten by someone who wants it more and will work harder. I can also guarantee you will fail without the correctly channelled enthusiasm required to see your plan through to success.

That’s not magic. It’s what’s called “applying yourself”.

I’m not up on a soap-box here. I’m not entertaining any ideas of becoming a motivational speaker and I’m certainly not telling people anything they don’t already know.

I just think it’s worth reminding ourselves that you don’t need to spend your hard-earned money to have Oprah or anyone else tell you what you already know about life and living.